On the train, by the window, rumbling south from the far north. Monday morning, she looked out through ’70s style Lennon sunglasses as she hunched over a college-rule notebook, pen in her left hand, wrist wrapped ’round purse so no one can grab and run.

Natural hair, close-cropped but growing out the last remnants of a henna job. It looked good — fashionable and two-tiered. I don’t know if she was hiding it under the white baseball cap turned backwards, or just was wearing a hat. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to stop her scribbling. » Read the rest of this entry «

He had a baseball cap popped too low on his head, like his mom had shoved it down before licking her thumb to scrub a bit of schmutz off his cheek. He noticed people looking at him — noticed me looking at him — and bit his lower lip, chewing it a bit as the train rumbled northward.

He turned and I got a better look down the aisle of the machine strapped to his hip. I helped pay for it. It could kill us all. » Read the rest of this entry «

We usually part in the morning. She leaves me behind before dawn’s crack during the school year. I let her go as the sun beats overhead when summer break starts.

No matter who leaves first, mornings are the time my wife and I say goodbye, chat about dinner and become our own selves for the day.

This week, though, she has business downtown. So I have company along my morning commute, the ‘L’ path among trees and towers. We rode the train together. My train. And I wonder if she saw. » Read the rest of this entry «

I don’t like how the train shrieks when it goes around even the slightest of bends.

It shrieks and croaks and I think if one could actually hear metal fatiguing in real time, that’s what going around the Loop in 2018 would sound like.

I don’t like how the corners all smell like pee, how if you do find a quiet nook where you can prop up against a window, sip coffee and watch the tops of trees meander by, you’re forced to wonder what dried where you’re sitting.

I don’t like when the homeless people scream or when I feel like a horrible person for wishing someone away when they just want to find a place to sleep without freezing to death.

I hauled some boxes from storage this week and made the mistake of looking at my past.

Letters, birthday cards, photos of people I had forgotten about and of people I won’t ever be able to. Trinkets and trophies hard-won but now more a matter of storage space than personal pride.

I’ve googled some people from that shared past, disparate present. Of course their photos are lovely and their web presence curated. Of course no one posts the moments of whimsy and maudlin and floating, aimless sad. No one of this crowd but me was dumb enough to put anything but happy things online.

The bar lets you bring in food from the greasy spoon next door, so I got a hamburger on a pita, which is apparently something that exists.

The place was designed for the young, the beer pong table and oversized Jenga tower attested, but at this early hour it was inhabited by the old. The guys at the bar talking wildly and broadly to pack in as much mock drunkness and youth as possible before their wives call them home for supper, old. The white-haired drinker at the end of the bar, silent but for the occasional gloomy sigh as he stared into nothing, real old.

And the bartender was old, thick Chicago accent that caused me to code switch into my own Chik-kahgo Guy ever so slightly as I ordered a beer to wash down my pita-meat.

I nestled by a window to watch snow glimmer over neon and sexless forms wrapped in scarf and hood hustle down the sidewalk. This was it. This was the place. This mixture of old men in a young bar, of desperation on a poor slip of a rich neighborhood, this sandwich ne’er before seen in my lifetime was a perfect, patented, ready-made 1,001 Chicago Afternoons story.

It started with a joke, not a good joke or a particularly funny one but one of the stock jokes one stranger tells another and then the second stranger chuckles politely, feels a lightly warm moment of shared humanity and then promptly forgets forever that the first stranger ever existed.

But in this case, the interaction of strangers didn’t end with the warm, human, pleasant, forgettable, boring, space-filling, meaningless little joke of jokes. That’s where it started.